K.Shridhar

• Oct 17th, 2006

 

Hi,Encryption and Decryption is know is Cryptography , to send a data in secure method means hiding the orfingal contents is known as Encryption and to read this data we have to do Decryption.Modern Web browsers use the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol for secure transactions like ecommerce purchases and banking. SSL works by using a public key for encryption and a different private key for decryption.Because SSL encryption depends so heavily on keys, one normally measures the effectiveness or strength of SSL encryption in terms of key length - number of bits in the key.The early implementations of SSL in Web browsers, first Netscape 3 and then Microsoft Internet Explorer 3, used a 40-bit SSL encryption standard. Unfortunately, 40-bit encryption proved too easy to decipher or crack in practice. To decipher an SSL communication, one simply needs to generate the correct decoding key.In cryptography, a common deciphering technique is brute-force decryption; essentially, using a computer to exhaustively calculate and try every possible key one by one. 2-bit encryption, for example, involves four possible key values: 00, 01, 10, and 11 3-bit encryption involves eight possible values, 4-bit encryption 16 possible values, and so on. Mathematically speaking, 2n possible values exist for an n-bit key.While 240 may seem like a very large number, it is not very difficult for modern computers to crack this many combinations in a reasonable time period. The makers of Web browser software recognized the need to increase the strength of encryption and moved to a new standard, 128-bit encryption several years ago.Compared to 40-bit encryption, 128-bit encryption offers 88 additional bits of key length. This translates to 288 or a whopping 309,485,009,821,345,068,724,781,056 additional combinations required for a brute-force crack.Based on the past history of improvements in computer performance, security experts expect that 128-bit encryption will work well on the Internet for at least the next ten years.Shridhar